It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time
The Story of the PRDA and the Cannonball Run ~ Chapter One
By Brad Niemcek
Driving non-stop from New York to California seemed to be the ultimately sensible plan.
Think of running an endurance race without pit stops – when everybody else has to make them. Think how much faster the other cars have to go to make up for the pit stops they make when you don¹t. Our goal in the 1971 Cannonball was to achieve a high average speed without ever having to achieve high over the road speeds.
So, that was the simple essence of the Polish Racing Drivers of America approach to the 1971 Cannonball. It was my brainchild, and Oscar okayed it. I don¹t know whether Tony did or not, but at least he never registered an objection to it.
Perhaps both of them were humoring me. Maybe neither thought that this dumb racing-across-country idea would ever come off.
But it did. Briggs Chevrolet of South Amboy, N.J. agreed to prepare a Van to our specifications, Gulf Oil agreed to supply us with the gas, shipped to us from Watkins Glen after the U.S. Grand Prix that year. And Goodyear agreed to supply us with the right mix of tires from the trip.
I told Goodyear that we’d start the race about 1,800 pounds heavier than we’d finish it. Interestingly, Goodyear shipped us different tires for the front and rear wheels – heavier duty tires for the rear, as I recall.
It was that conversation with Goodyear that first got me thinking about how serious it was to haul 1,830 pounds of Gulf racing fuel in a Chevy Sportsvan.
I finally came to grips with it – 300 gallons of gasoline is not something to trifle with. So I set about figuring out how, first, to secure it inside the vehicle. We ended up with a pretty basic plan. We¹d lay the five 55-gallon drums (I know, that¹s only 275 gallons, but let¹s not quibble) on their sides, encased in an angle-iron framework fabricated by the guys at Briggs.
The next step was to figure out how to access the gasoline in those drums. I came up with the plan and Frank Dominiani, who operated a Corvette shop on Long Island, unenthusiastically agreed to help me execute it.
The plan was to transfer gas from one drum at a time into the van¹s gas tank. When the gas gauge told us to refill, we¹d open a tap on one of the drum¹s and it would flow from the drum to the tank.
That required a manifold fuel transfer system. We used high-quality hoses and couplings and installed an electric fuel pump near the back of the van so that we would not have to rely on gravity for good fuel flow.
I supplied Dominiani with two spare screw-on caps for each drum and he drilled them for the hose fittings, layed out the hosing, installed the electric fuel pump and buttoned everything up.
But before that could happen, I had to answer a question about this van that I had encountered years earlier in my first race car. Here¹s how that happened. A friend, scoping out my second-hand King Formula Vee in 1968, had asked me:
“Do you know what will happen if you get this car upside down?”
“No, what?” I said, never having contemplated that possibility. It was, after all, my first year in racing. I didn¹t know much about anything technical.
“Well, picture this,” he said. “You’ll be sitting in your car (if you’re lucky), upside down, and gasoline will be pouring all over you.” He had spotted the fact that I had a simple vent pipe at the top of the tank.
My friend suggested a simple fix: Find some way to allow the fuel tank to breathe when the car is upright and then close the breather vent if and when the tank was pointed the wrong way — because the car was.
His remedy was a modified check valve. Normally, a check valve is used to prevent the reverse flow of a liquid. It is a simple cylindrically-shaped device with a spring-loaded lump of metal inside that opens when pressured in one direction and snaps shut when pressured in the other. I¹d need to take the valve apart, remove the spring and put it back together again. The fuel-blocking lump would close the valve by gravity.
At my friend’s suggestion, I bought a couple of check valves at one of those fascinating army surplus stores on Canal Street, in New York. They only cost a dollar or two, as I remember. And, sure enough, it was a snap to unscrew the value, remove the spring and, voila! I’d never have to worry about gasoline dripping on me in an upside-down race car.
I¹ve never had the opportunity to sit in an upside-down car, so I only know in theory that modified aircraft check valves work like they should in a car. But I was a believer.
And that’s the route I took in the design of the fueling system for the PRDA Van for the 1971 Cannonball Sea To Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. What I needed to do was return to Canal Street in search of more check valves ¬ five of them, this time, one for each of the drums.
Did the check valves work? Did the system perform as planned? Did we make the entire trip without a gas stop?
Those and other exciting questions will be answered next time.
Slick Thinking…
The Story of the PRDA and the Cannonball Run ~ Chapter Two
By Brad Niemcek
I don’t want to seem to obsess about this, but I think I was once a victim of obsessive-compulsive urges. How else can I explain my compulsion about oil consumption. It reared its ugly head in our preparations for the 1971 Cannonball and produced one of the scariest moments we had on our cross-country quest for fame and fortune.
No matter what the reason, I was convinced that we¹d need to add oil to the brand new Chevrolet V8 engine in the PRDA van sometime during the course of its first 3,000 miles of existence ¬ maybe a number of times. Did I have any basis for that belief, any experience with new engines burning lots of oil? No. But there it is.
And, since our whole plan was to drive non-stop from Manhattan to Redondo Beach, California, I had to come up with a way of checking the oil level and adding new stuff (if needed) while on the move.
I came up with what I thought was a remarkably simple fix: I asked the guys at Briggs Chevrolet in South Amboy, NJ, to reverse the right (passenger side) tappet cover on the engine so that we could access the dip stick and the oil filler cap from inside the van. On a long downward slope, we¹d turn the engine off, check the oil level on the dipstick and do our oil-adding thing, as necessary, while coasting.
Trouble is, it turns out the engine did not seem to like what happens when the rightside tappet the cover is oriented improperly. We found that out shortly after exiting the Lincoln Tunnel in New Jersey and accelerating to our, ahem, cruising speed.
What happened was a loud pop and the van was filled with smoke. Yes, you can picture it if you try: A smoke-filled van loaded with 300 gallons of gasoline, roaring along the highway at something in excess of 65 mph.
We obviously needed to do something quickly. We quickly removed the engine shroud and discovered that the rubber filler cap ¬ an unvented rubber stopper, really, had blown right off of its base. For some reason pressure would build up under the cover because, we guessed, of its non-stock orientation.
We replaced the cap. It blew off again. More smoke. Intense concern.
Much calm, intelligent discussion among the three of us ensued. It was Tony who finally came up with a solution. We need to vent the tappet chamber, he said. Well, we couldn¹t just leave the cap off, could we? And we certainly couldn’t have engine fumes pouring into the van for the next 3,000 miles either, could we?
Fortunately, and I have no idea why, we had the materials to fix the problem. (No, not really “we”, it was Tony¹s brainstorm.) We ducktaped a piece of heater hose to the tappet cover in the place of the cap, then ran the hose out of the passenger side wing window.
And, then we held our breaths. And it worked! The open wing window made a little noise but a van is not a particularly quiet vehicle at highway speeds anyway.
We were finally able to proceed, in relative calm. And things stayed that way – until the fuel pump decided to fry itself. Why? These and other exciting questions will be answered next time.
When You Could Have ANY Car You Wanted…
The Story of the PRDA and the Cannonball Run ~ Chapter Three
By Brad Niemcek
So there we were, roaring westward with, as I remember, Oscar now behind the wheel. After the smoke had cleared, (see previous chapter) it was time for me to switch into publicity mode. I was to call a radio station in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley and report on our progress. All of Oscar’s fans in the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre area could keep tabs on us this way.
You know something? We found that there isn’t much to talk about from the inside of a noisy van rolling westward on Interstate 80, unless you want to giggle about how fast you’re going. So, we were delighted when the batteries died in the radio-telephone rig — a big, cumbersome thing in an attache case — somewhere in the midwest. Remember, this was 1971. Congress didn’t even authorize the creation of the cellular telephone business until twelve years later.
We’d agreed to “report in” to the station from time to time at the request of a sponsor, Mrs. T’s Kishkies. Mrs. T was really a guy by the name of Ted Twardzik, an old friend of Danny Zack, who named his pastry pockets after his mother, Mary. We were not privy to the deal between Danny and Ted. We were just glad that Danny had some help with this operation. (Google update: Mrs. T’s — Atteco, Inc. — now ships an estimated 11 million pierogies a week to customers worldwide. I could find no reference to kishkis but believe they are just about the same as pierogies, only not as Polish.)
Danny Zack was no babe in the woods when it came to sponsorship deals. His Briggs Chevrolet dealership (he married into it when he married Joan Briggs) was perhaps the leading high performance dealer in New Jersey. To enhance the that high performance image, he sponsored the legendary Funny Car driver, “Jungle Jim” Liberman, and the famous John Greenwood Corvette road racing team, among others. You might say we were is a rather unusual addition to his promotional portfolio.
We were clueless about all this when Oscar got a letter from Zack, which said, basically, “I believe I am the only Polish Ferrari dealer in the world. We should talk.” Zack had read about us in the New York Times in a feature story our good friend, John Radosta, wrote about the creation of the PRDA.
Oscar and I arranged an introductory meeting at the dealership in South Amboy. We met with both Zacks, Danny and Joan. They were both very nice and I can’t remember much more about the meeting than that. I remember the Zacks as a nicely-dressed couple (Danny had been a musician) and that Joan asked as many questions as Danny did that day. But my memories of that first meeting go no further than that, maybe because at that point we had nothing to sell.
Brock Yates’ column in the August Car And Driver changed all that. Danny Zack had told us to bring him a deal and he’d take a look at it. I called Oscar and Tony and proposed that we tell Danny that we wanted to race Brock Yates to California — in a car Briggs would prepare for us.
I was pleasantly surprised when both Oscar and Tony agreed, and I called Danny.
“What kind of car do you want?” asked Danny. “I don’t know. I’ll get back to you on that,” I said.
I liked the van idea from the start, especially if we could equip it with enough fuel to make the trip non-stop. So, we pitched the van idea to Danny Zack and he agreed.
You may recall that Zack first described himself as “the only Polish Ferrari dealer in the world.” So why didn’t I propose we do the Cannonball in a Ferrari Daytona Coupe, or something really cool like that? Like Yates and Dan Gurney did?
Well, I may not have been smart enough to figure out how much fuel a van would burn on the way to California, but I was smart enough to count how many people that would fit in a Ferrari. And since I was the only one of the three founding members of the PRDA with zero credibility in a Ferrari, I knew I would be the one left behind in New York, by default.
So, a van it was, and Danny Zack’s crew at Briggs Chevrolet did a marvelous job getting it ready for the big event — with a little help from Gulf Oil (McLaren team race fuel left over from the US Grand Prix), Goodyear (a special tire set-up) and even John Greenwood (a borrowed LeMans Corvette rear end). Oh, and don’t forget the beer and kischkis party that Mrs. T’s threw for us before the start.
How could a set-up like that not be a winner? We’ll see.
Ethics? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Ethics…
The Story of the PRDA and the Cannonball Run ~ Chapter Four
By Brad Niemcek
History has exposed the flaw in my thinking about how best to race from coast to coast. But, remember, the founding members of the PRDA did prove one thing: That we could average almost 80 mph from New York to California — for almost 3,000 miles — without getting arrested. Or even stopped by the police. And that was no mean trick.
Perhaps, you might say, we spent too much time worrying about that. I suppose that may be fair criticism. I say it “may be” because we did have some concerns.
Was it about getting arrested? Or did our concerns run more deeply than that? Could it be that Oscar, Tony and I had ethical problems with the idea of racing across country… about running the risk, as Brock Yates was so fond of saying, “of slamming into a school bus filled with children and nuns.”
Nah! Remember, this was 1971. It was before the first “energy crisis” and before the “double nickel.” This was the era of the GTO, the Detroit factory-fueled madness of the Trans-Am series, the high-octane stunts of guys like Evel Knievel and Joey Chitwood. Ethics? I had a course like that in college once but I don’t remember ever pondering the ethical issues involved in flagrantly violating the laws of the highway.
I do remember having some doubts, but only briefly. They came and they went with remarkable ease, as I recall.
In fact, they evapoarated one Saturday night. My wife and I had been invited to a house party at her parents’ home on Long Island. That gathering of sober, stable, mature folks would be a perfect place to gut check the idea. What, I remember wondering, would these good citizens at the party think about the Cannonball idea?
The answer came quickly and easily and I was stunned. All I had to do was describe the race to my father-in-law’s friends, and their faces lit up. I ignited a buzz in the room. This group of 60-ish guys loved the idea!
Okay, that obviously does not qualify as an ethical review of the idea. All I suppose I accomplished was to forestall my worries that “responsible” people would think me a raving lunatic for undertaking such a project. The morals or the ethnics of the endeavor? Let’s just say they remained unexamined — at least by me.
I’ve asked Oscar and Tony — recently — whether anything about the Cannonball worried them at that time. Tony recalled that he had some concerns how the racing establishment might view his participation. Would they think him frivolous, undeserving of, say, a good ride at Indy?
Oscar is another matter. I remember nothing about his concerns back then and he deflected the question when asked about it more recently. Actually, it¹s pretty difficult these days to get Oscar to think, or talk, about anything that does not interest him.
So, no, we did not spend time wondering about the ethics of breaking the law, or putting the financial stability of our families at risk. Or, for that matter, putting anyone else at risk either. We just did it!
And had a hell of a good time doing it.
But it should be remembered that Oscar and Tony only consented to do the Cannonball once. Brock Yates staged it a total of five times. Could they have been lured back to the competition?
You bet – but not for just another race from New York to California. We all wanted something much bigger – New York to Paris! More about that later.
Lights. Camera. Action. Sort’a…
Who Would Have Believed The Truth?
By Brad Niemcek
A lot of questions came to mind while we pounded down those highways in November of 1971. There wasn’t much else to do. Oscar, Tony and I were not close enough friends to have all that much to talk about. And, as I’ve already noted, the inside of the PRDA van was very noisy ¬ especially at the speeds we were running ¬ so talking would have been difficult anyway.
So, when I was neither driving nor navigating I had a lot of time on my hands. And a fair number of questions came popping up.
“What happens if we get arrested?” “What happens if we crash this thing?” “Is this perhaps the stupidest thing I’ve ever tried to do?” There were all kinds of questions like that bumping around in my brain. But I do not ever recall asking myself, “Wouldn’t this make a great movie?”
Like most reasonably normal folks, I don’t see my life unfolding as a screenplay. That may be because I am not a Hollywood type. I love movies, but with popcorn, if you know what I mean.
So I was surprised when Brock Yates called to ask me whether I had any objection to being in a Cannonball movie.
Well, he didn’t exactly say we’d be “in” the movie. He wanted to know if I had a problem with being depicted in the movie.
Bud Stanner, Brock’s agent, was negotiating a Hollywood deal for him. Brock, as “owner” of the Cannonball, would of course get paid for “use” of the concept and, in fact, Brock was to be the screenwriter.
Stanner looked after Brock’s interests in Hollywood, no easy matter. And Brock himself was given the job of negotiating a deal with us. He asked us, in essence, if we would agree to be depicted in the movie for free. And to waive any rights to influence how we would be depicted. Or anything else. No bobble-head dolls. No line of PRDA Cannonball clothing. No diecast models of the PRDA van.
To top it off, he said he had no idea how the PRDA would look in the movie because he had not yet begun writing the script.
Heck of a deal, don’t ya think?
All three of the founding members of the PRDA agreed, of course. After all, Brock hinted darkly, if we didn’t waive all of our rights in the film project, the Cannonball movie deal might come unglued.
We had no difficulty with Yates making money from the Cannonball. After all, this is America and, besides, everybody knows that magazine writers aren’t paid very well. So we signed the written agreements sent to us. And then we waited.
Months went by. Finally, I called Yates and asked about the movie. He told me that the PRDA had indeed been written into the story and had in fact been filmed… driving a van that careened out of control and blew up.
Studio lawyers, Brock said, were appalled. Wouldn’t such a depiction of ethnic incompetence offend Polish-American movie fans everywhere? After all, they presumably reasoned, Polacks are not known for their sense of humor. Ticket sales might suffer.
Thus, the entire presence of the PRDA in “Cannonball Run” was eliminated, and our magnificent struggle to beat one of the best drivers in the world in one of the world’s fastest cars ended up, as they say in the business, on the editing room floor. The decision was made reluctantly, Brock said. Our one chance at Hollywood stardom was over.
In fact, none of the competitors in the first Cannonball made it passed the Hollywood censors. Not even Dan Gurney or Brock Yates. And what happened? Were the sniveling cowards punished for their stupidity? No, Cannonball Run became the sixth-largest grossing film of 1981.
Just imagine, they substituted Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise, and Farrah Fawcett for Oscar Koveleski, Tony Adamowicz and me. Well, so be it. And, yes, I do have a copy of the movie on tape. [Editor’s Note: Brad never mentions which PRDA member was played by whom.]
I have only one more thought. Do you know what has always bothered me about this? It’s the fact that not one person in the 30 years since that first movie appeared has anyone ever asked me why we weren’t in the movie or thought it notable that we were not.
I’ve pretty much gotten over it. Just don’t ask me what I think about Cannonball Run II.